Tiny desert community of Trona hopes to rise from the ashes

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Trona High School homecoming queen Wyndi Robison, 18, rides down Main Street in the homecoming parade on October 10 in Trona. The Searles Valley Minerals factory is the largest employer in the tiny desert community on the border of Death Valley.

“Anywhere else is not Trona,” Sandy Sprouse said. “It’s unique in every sense of the word.”

The tiny unincorporated community on Death Valley’s southwestern border is 170 miles northeast of Los Angeles and an hour and a half north of the High Desert community of Adelanto. Souvenirs sold at the Searles Valley Historical Society museum in Trona display a road sign — created to promote a local sign company — that reads “End of World, 10 miles; Trona, 15 miles.”

There’s a faint whiff of sulphur detectable much of the time, coming from the long white chimneys of the Searles Valley Minerals factory.

“It’s the smell of people working, paying taxes, sending their kids to college,” said historian Russ Kaldenberg, co-author of “Around Trona and Searles Valley,” published in August by Arcadia Publishing. “It used to smell like rotten eggs a lot, but they put new scrubbers in. But all industries (smell); you ever been around a wood pulp mill? … The smell is basically gone; years ago, it was a heck of a lot worse.”

Although the air is clearer than it was in Trona’s heyday, in other ways, the community has fallen on hard times. But residents are passionate about Trona and are working to bring back better days.

All-alumni weekend

Every five years, homecoming weekend is an “All Alumni Reunion” for graduates of Trona High. Former residents return in droves. This year, 527 alumni said they would, according to Sprouse, a retired bus driver, member of the Trona Joint Unified school board and member of the Trona High Class of 1972.

“I don’t know why people leave; I love it here,” she said. “But I don’t think people all see it the way I do.”

Friday night, alumni gathered to drink, eat and dance at the Elks Lodge on Trona Road. The entire community is sandwiched between the factory to the west and the dry Searles Lake bed to the east.

“Most people drive only one mile to work — and that ain’t bad,” Sprouse said.

Some alumni moved away after graduation. Others never left. And others boomeranged back home.

“People always leave, and they always come back home,” said Analisa Huggins, Trona High Class of 1988. “The housing prices are really good here; we have lots of nice homes that just need a face-lift.”

Ginny Davis, Trona High Class of 1969, was one of those who left.

“We were transferred up to the Pacific Northwest and that’s where we stayed,” she said. “But even my kids consider Trona home.”

Trona retains that hometown feel for Davis, even 46 years after she graduated.

“When you come home, you fall into conversations like you just saw people yesterday,” she said. “You just keep that camaraderie.”

Huggins graduated in 1988.

“I left right after that and I was gone for almost 18 years. I wanted to be in the city, like everybody else,” she said.

But she returned from Turlock (population 70,365) in Stanislaus County in 2007, after her husband fell in love with the desert.

“There’s no friends like Trona friends,” Huggins said. “You meet wonderful people outside of Trona, but you just come home and you pick up where you left off.”

Still, she sees the way the community has declined since she graduated.

“In a perfect world, I wish there was an investor who’d come in here, remodel the homes and encourage people to come back here,” Huggins said.

The past

When John Searles arrived in the area in the 1860s, he didn’t find what he was looking for.

“Searles was after gold and silver and he had silver mines that were burned down by the Indians,” Kaldenberg said.

What he found instead in the dry lake bed on the border of Death Valley was a white crystalline powder — borax. In 1873, Searles went into production, mining a chemical still used in industrial and commercial products even today.

After his death in 1897, a rival company bought out Searles’ company and shut down production in Searles Lake.

In 1914, the American Trona Company established the company town of Trona, named for crystals of soda ash formed by the evaporation of chemical-rich water commonly found in the lake bed.

“All the professionals and the managers were expected to live in Trona,” said Jim Fairchild, Kaldenberg’s co-author on “Around Trona and Searles Valley.” “If you were an engineer out of school, you were expected to live here if you wanted to advance in the company. And they didn’t hide the fact that that’s what they wanted. So we lived over here.”

For the next 60 years, the community thrived, until the company, now known as American Potash, was bought by the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corp. in 1974 — “and they didn’t want to have a town,” Kaldenberg said.

“It was a company town and the company sold it,” he said. “The company basically wanted everybody to leave, but they didn’t leave, because they had vested interests here.”

Many did leave after the factory’s new owners cut production in half in 1982 and instituted massive layoffs.

“A lot of people just looked around and said ‘my house isn’t worth anything’ and they just left,” Sprouse said. “And that hurt us.”

Redlands-based geographic information systems firm Esri calculates, based on 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data, that Trona had 1,883 residents in 2010 and has 1,904 residents today, down from a peak of about 6,000 decades ago. Esri predicts a population of 1,941 in 2020. But as the population trickles back up, Esri data are projecting it will age, with the average age of a Trona resident going from an average of 41.6 years old in 2010 to 45 years old in 2020.

“It was probably going to be inevitable, because Ridgecrest has a much larger employment base than over here, so they attracted a lot more businesses,” Fairchild said. “The Wal-Mart, the Home Depot and all that. And basically, that sucked the life out of the businesses over here. They were all small businesses and they couldn’t compete price-wise. So today, we go over to Ridgecrest once a week for shopping.”

Ghost houses

Today, vacant and abandoned buildings litter Trona, some boarded up, others with broken windows, still others in some stage of collapse, giving the impression that Trona is halfway to becoming a ghost town.

“What are you going to do? A lot of the houses are basically abandoned. They’re delinquent on taxes, but the county won’t take over — they don’t want to be responsible for them,” Fairchild said. “So they’re basically abandoned, like no owner. What are you going to do?”

“We probably have got over 50 (vacant buildings). They’re falling apart,” said Doris Van Horn, the captain at San Bernardino County Fire Department Station 57 in Trona and a 17-year veteran of Trona Care, a nonprofit working to clean up the community. “These houses are so bad, there’s hardly nothing standing. They’re just shells.”

Last year, Trona Care took down a dozen houses, using $65,000 in matching funds provided by San Bernardino County. Legally, they can’t just tear down the buildings on their own.

“They were built before 1986 and there’s asbestos in them,” Van Horn said. “They have to be tested and cleared and then they’re hauled away.”

The group doesn’t have money to do more.

“Right now, we’re stuck again. We can take down houses with our own hands, but now regulations have changed so that they can’t be torn down by hand.”

It costs about $12,000 to take down a house properly, according to Van Horn. Raising that kind of money isn’t easy.

“If we have a fundraiser, the most we can make is $1,000,” she said. “Everybody supports it, but we have a small community.”

The group is going to apply for grants to raise more money.

“Everything is a process. … I want everything to be faster and quicker,” Sprouse said, clapping out a fast rhythm with her hands, “but it just doesn’t work that way.”

Trona Joint Unified

On Saturday morning, the Trona High homecoming court climbed onto the hoods of muscle cars and rode down Main Street, throwing candy to children in the crowd of more than a thousand people lining the homecoming parade route. Over homecoming court’s left shoulder was the Searles Valley Minerals factory.

Under an agreement with the Bureau of Land Management, a cut of mining royalties goes to Trona Joint Unified each year, about $3 million annually recently.

“A long time ago, it was in the contract for the teachers to be the third-highest paid in California, because we had the money,” Sprouse said. “Now, when we try to get teachers to come out here, it’s real difficult.”

The aging of Trona is visible in the enrollment of the Trona Joint Unified School District: According to the California Department of Education, the district had 576 students during the 1996-97 school year. By the 2014-15 school year, that number had dropped to 250.

“I lived in Ridgecrest for a little bit, and I went to bigger schools and I didn’t get the one-on-one time with teachers,” said Wyndi Robison, 18, a senior and Trona High’s homecoming queen and student government president. “Here, you feel more like it’s a family structure, because we’re all so small and so close and everybody knows everybody.”

Wolfe teaches government, history and social studies in addition to his administrative duties, along with running the AVID college preparedness program and working with ROP technical instruction program. His classes typically have between 10 and 24 students in them. In Etiwanda, Wolfe taught 38 students at a time.

“If a kid ditches — which happens rarely — we know immediately,” said Ruth Soto, the school’s guidance counselor. “And we know usually where to find them. It’s got its benefits.”

A small district also has its downsides, including a limited number of classes offered in person. Spanish is taught by Soto, who alternates teaching Spanish I and Spanish II on an annual basis.

“When you work in a small district, you’re kind of a jack of all trades,” she said.

Here, the former Brawley High counselor has to deal with a quarter of the students who made up her portion of the counseling case load.

“There is no wood shop. There is no metal shop. There is no auto shop. There is no home ec,” said Sandy Sprouse’s daughter Sari, a member of the Class of 1994. “These are things I did have when I was going there — and it’s a bummer.”

The limited offerings at Trona High are supplemented by online classes offered by Cal State Dominguez Hills and Cerro Coso Community College in Ridgecrest.

But residents are passionate about their school district:

“School district voting here is just intense,” Kaldenberg said. “A lot of places, people don’t show up to vote. They do here.”

Wolfe and Soto have been preaching the gospel of a college education in a community where the mineral plant looms large. (Searles Valley Minerals employs more than 700 employees, according to its website.)

“We bring in college-educated people from the plant, engineers, and they say ‘look, you know how much money I make over here? One hundred and forty thousand dollars. Go get a degree in engineering and come back to Trona and make 140 grand,’ ” Wolfe said. Blue collar work at the plant “is still good money, but if you get hurt, then what do you do then?”

Both Wolfe and Soto live in Trona.

“Living here has helped me, at my age, to get out of debt, just because of the cost of living in this town,” Wolfe said. “I have a four-bedroom house and I pay $600. When I was living in Etiwanda, I got a two-bedroom and paid $1,700.”

“I paid $44,000 for a four-bedroom house,” Soto said. She intends to retire in Trona in a few years. Her grandchildren live close by — in Ridgecrest.

“In the last probably 20 years, it’s grown about six-fold in size and attendance,” Fairchild said.

He estimates more than 4,000 people attend the show, based on the number of cars driving out onto Searles Lake during the mine tours.

“It’s a solution mine, so there’s no open holes or particularly hazardous areas. And they can go out and collect complete crystals, good crystals, attractive crystals,” Fairchild said. “The only drawback is that they’re all water-soluble.”

The mining is done by pumping water into the salt bed. The water gets saturated with minerals, which is then pumped to the plant, where the minerals — including borax, soda ash and sodium sulfate — are extracted.

The event attracts enthusiasts from around the West, the country and even from overseas.

“The gem show is a unique show in the world. Nothing else in the world like it,” Fairchild said. “We’ve had people say ‘I’m a geologist because of your show.’ ”

He’s been in Trona since 1963, after growing up in Pasadena and getting a double-major in chemistry and chemical engineering from UC Berkeley.

“I had five (job) offers, but this looked like a nice place to live,” Fairchild said. “I was familiar with the desert and decided ‘I want to go live in the desert.’ ”

The big game

On a Saturday afternoon, the 4-1 Trona Tornadoes squared off against the 2-4 Immanuel Christian Crusaders, visiting from Ridgecrest, in the homecoming game.

The Tornadoes and Crusaders play eight-man football in the four-member Hi-Lo League, made up of small schools in the remote desert regions of San Bernardino County. Trona switched from 11-man play in the 2003-04 school year after years of struggling to get enough boys to field a full team.

Under a cloudless sky and a high of 101 degrees Fahrenheit, hundreds of Trona fans crowded into the shade provided by the press box to watch. Toddlers in Trona Tornadoes cheerleader uniforms wandered the stands. On the far side of the field, under a single pop-up tent, a handful of Ridgecrest adults squinted in the glare off Griffith Field.

“When we go and play out-of-town games, most people talk bad about Trona, about how it stinks, the houses are burned out and stuff like that,” said Travis Redd, 17, a tight-end and punter for the Tornadoes.

They talk a different game when they’re playing in Trona and are slowly climbing to their feet on the all-dirt football field locals call “The Pit.”

“They whine that the dirt’s in their mouth,” Redd said.

The Tornadoes, who practice there, bounced back up after each play, as though they were playing at the Rose Bowl.

Trona High and the Pit triumphed over the Crusaders in a 46-0 blow-out.

The future

Saturday evening, the Trona High auditorium was decorated for the homecoming dance, with teal balloons and a “Paradise Island” theme. A disc jockey, who could be students’ father or perhaps grandfather, played hits of the ’70s and ’80s. Students danced during slow songs, zipping from table to table to sit with their friends during faster-paced tunes. The punch bowl went un-spiked.

“A lot of the kids, when they’re seniors, want to get away from here, but I think that’s pretty common wherever you go,” Soto said.

After graduation, Redd wants to study political science at a college or university in the Los Angeles area.

“I obviously know that I want to go off to college somewhere else, but I know that I’ll always come back,” Robison said. She wants to attend the University of Idaho. “Even if I don’t live here for the rest of my life, I have so much family here, I went through elementary through high school here, so I know I’ll always come back, sometime. Everyone that I know that’s left, I’ve always seen them come back somehow.”

Tyler McLean, 17, a Trona High senior, the student government secretary, and tight end and defensive lineman for the Tornadoes, just wants to go.

“I want to go to college, somewhere out of here, so I can come back here (after) seeing different places,” he said. “But I don’t know where yet.”

But there are signs of new life in Trona.

“Family Dollar just moved in,” Kaldenberg said. “That was a dump, where they were. They tore down, they gutted an old building, they used the same structure and put a nice building there. So they’re investing in the town.”

It’s humble, as grocery stores go, with only a single refrigerator aisle. Although Family Dollar sells milk, the store sells no fresh fruit or vegetables, and no meat other than lunch meat, bacon and hot dogs.

“A young couple bought the Trails Drive-In, because they want to stay here,” Kaldenberg said. “They grew up here.”

Others think there are ways to use Trona’s proximity to Death Valley to bring prosperity back to the community.

“I see this place becoming a tourist town, I really do,” Wolfe said. “We’re the gateway to one of the most incredible things in the world, we’ve got people driving through this place all the time. We can think bigger, we can think ‘look, we can improve this place,’ and improve the lives, and the education and the economics of this town, and not just rely on the plant full time.”

It’s not likely to grow substantially: Water restrictions make new housing developments unlikely, Fairchild said, and Trona’s small population is unlikely to attract much retail investment. But there are those who believe Trona’s best days are still ahead of it.

“I definitely think Trona is a story of hope,” Wolfe said. “And definitely of looking to the future.”

Searles Valley timeline

1862 – While prospecting for gold and silver in the Slate Range mountains, John W. Searles finds borax on the dry surface of what is now Searles Lake. The find goes unrecognized.

1913 – Consolidated Gold Fields of South Africa forms the American Trona Corporation, which in turn acquires the California Trona Company.

1914 – The Trona Railway Company completes 31 miles of track to Trona from the Searles Station junction of the Southern Pacific Railroad. American Trona Corporation establishes the company-owned town of Trona.

1915 – Potash production begins and totals 250 tons for the year.

1916 – The Solvay Process Company and Pacific Borax Company form the Borosolvay operation and boost the lake’s potash output to 36,000 tons annually.

1920 – Consolidated Gold Fields sells its interests in the American Trona Corporation to a Dutch syndicate for $12 million. Smith forms the West End Chemical Company.

1977 – Kerr-McGee Chemical Corporation begins operation of its new Argus power plant, the first large industrial boiler in California fired by coal.

1982 – In the Trona Plant, Kerr-McGee Chemical Corporation shuts down half the potash, half the borax, and all the sodium sulfate production, as well as all the gas fired boilers. Major layoffs occur.

1990 – D. George Harris and Associates acquires the Soda Products Division of the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corporation and forms the North American Chemical Company.

1996 – North American Chemical Company shuts down all potash and borax production at the Trona Plant, bringing to an end the 81-year history of recovering potash from Searles Lake brines.

1998 – IMC Global Incorporation acquires Trona’s North American Chemical Company. The North American Chemical Company facilities at Trona and Westend are renamed IMC Chemicals Incorporated to match the name of their parent corporation.

2004 – Sun Capital Investments LLC acquires all of the IMC Chemicals facilities in Searles Valley. At the same time, all of the operation was renamed Searles Valley Minerals, Inc.

Beau Yarbrough wrote his first newspaper article taking on an authority figure (his middle school principal) when he was in 7th grade. He’s been a professional journalist since 1992, working in Virginia, Egypt and California. In that time, he’s covered community news, features, politics, local government, education, the comic book industry and more. He’s covered the war in Bosnia, interviewed presidential candidates, written theatrical reviews, attended a seance, ridden in a blimp and interviewed both Batman and Wonder Woman (Adam West and Lynda Carter). He also cooks a mean pot of chili.